Glacier Bay National Park. Two and a half centuries ago, the entire area was covered by thick sheets of ice.

High snowfall and cold weather to blame.

A bitterly cold Alaskan summer has had surprising results. For the first time in the area's recorded history, area glaciers have begun to expand, rather than shrink. Summer temperatures, which were some 3 degrees below average, allowed record levels of winter snow to remain much longer, leading to the increase in glacial mass.

"In mid-June, I was surprised to see snow still at sea level in Prince William Sound", said glaciologist Bruce Molnia. "In general, the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years".

"On the Juneau Icefield, there was still 20 feet of new snow on the surface [in] late July. At Bering Glacier, a landslide I am studying [did] not become snow free until early August."

Molnia, who works for the US Geological Survey, said it's been a "long time" since area glaciers have seen a positive mass balance -- an increase in the total amount of ice they contain.

Since 1946, the USGS has maintained a research project measuring the state of Alaskan glaciers. This year saw records broken for most snow buildup. It was also the first time since any records began being that the glaciers did not shrink during the summer months.

Those records date from the mid 1700s, when the region was first visited by Russian explorers. Molnia estimates that Alaskan glaciers have lost about 15% of their total area since that time -- an area the size of Connecticut.

One of the largest areas of shrinkage has been at the national park of Glacier Bay. When Alexei Ilich Chirikof first arrived in 1741, the bay didn't exist at all -- only a solid wall of ice. From that time until the early 1900s, the ice retreated some 50 miles, to form the bay and surrounding area.

Accordingly to Molnia, a difference of just 3 or 4 degrees is enough to shift the mass balance of glaciers from rapid shrinkage to rapid growth. From the 1600s to the 1900s, that’s just the amount of warming that was seen, as the planet exited the Little Ice Age.

Molnia says one cold summer doesn't mean the start of a new climatic trend. At least years like this, however, might mark the beginning of another Little Ice Age.

Will we ever see an article like this from Jason Mick, or one talking about some isolated evidence of global warming by Masher?

No, I think we'll never see that. :)

Meanwhile, we'll keep on having the nice article warz with each of them supporting his own ideology. Kinda fun, reading both sides you can make a somewhat impartial image in your mind about the status of these matters.

There is no war. I think you kinda missed Asher's point... Jason is going bananas with his tree hugging. Asher is just saying for every bit of evidence that says there's global warming, there's evidence to say there's global cooling.

All this data Jason's using to "prove" his point has only existed for a miniscule amount of time - Earth is oh... 4.5 BILLION years old - even if we had 450 years of data, that's about 0.00001% of Earth's entire existence. The last ice age was 20 THOUSAND years ago. even 450 years of data is a drop in that bucket.

Jason's the only one pushing agendas, Asher's just trying to act as a counterbalance - devil's advocate if you will. Asher isn't for or against GW. He's pointing out that the entire fight is moot: good ol' force of nature and all the momentum behind it is going to do whatever it wants - humanity be damned.

The problem is "green" tech isn't a better way of doing things. If it was, you wouldn't need government laws to push people to use it.

Maybe wind, solar, ethanol, and other things will one day be better than other sources, but until that happens, the crap needs to stay in the lab and mature, and not have tens of billions of tax dollars spent to subsidize it.

Regulating the stock market, mortgages and loans is also a bad way of doing things. If it was, you wouldn't need government laws to push banks to do it. Let the banks do as they please, and the market will self-regulate.

Oh, wait.

Guess what, most industry (like most banks, etc.) these days cares only about short-term profits, frequently at the cost of the whole sector's long-term survivability (auto industry anyone?). In this case the "sector" happens to be the only planet we live on.

Believing the industry will "self-regulate" is like believing that you don't need police or jails or laws against murder and theft because "people will self-regulate". Must be nice over there in la-la land, but try visiting the real world some time.

Governments and laws exist for a reason. Just because you happened to support an incompetent government that did more to screw us up in eight years than all our (real and made-up) enemies combined, don't pretend now that the problem is with the concept of regulation. On the contrary, the problem is with the morons who think regulation is unnecessary (and the morons who put them there and continued to support them as the hole got deeper, because they'd rather screw everyone else than lose face by admitting they were wrong).

Yes... to a point. There's practical green, and there's tree-hugger green. Practical green would be nuclear power and hydrogen cars. Tree-hugger green is solar panels with toxic chemicals used in its manufacturing and prohibitively expensive (or a long profit turnover) wind turbines. To the tree-huggers, it's only the end-result that matters, process be damned.

People forget it's his type that practically stalled nuclear development in the 70s. If they didn't, we might just be all: 1. on cleaner nuclear power - the theories to recycle and reduce nuclear waste existed decades ago, but thanks to the nuclear stall, they sat dormant until recently; 2. not dependent on foreign oil.

I read a small news blurb today, which said that food prices are quite high, but there "is enough food".

So...

1. Is it better to produce too much food, so we can keep prices down and throw away the stuff we don't eat?

2. Lower prices for food means farmers get less paid. The ones that are hurt the most by this is third world farmers who cannot afford the luxury of using oil-based fertilizers.

3. Food prices was recently on a historic low. Feel free to compare prices now with the prices 30 years ago. Still much lower.

4. Most ethanol is produced in Brazil. I doubt growing cheap food in South America will help the Africans much.

5. ...but the cheaper oil prices as a result of more people using bio-fuels will help everyone!

6. In the end, the ugly question "just how large a population can our planet sustain?" rears it head, followed by "is it better to have 100 million starve to death now, compared with billions some years from now when the real food shortage will hit us?"

7. If Americans are really concerned about the food prices, they should start eating less. There really is no need for anyone to weigh more than 100kg.

Brazil produces a lot of ethanol this is true. However, because the government taxes the imported ethanol so much and subsidizes the American made ethanol so much, the American made stuff is "cheaper" to buy.

quote: 1. Is it better to produce too much food, so we can keep prices down and throw away the stuff we don't eat?

Lower prices doesn't necessarily mean food gets tossed in the ocean.

quote: 2. Lower prices for food means farmers get less paid. The ones that are hurt the most by this is third world farmers who cannot afford the luxury of using oil-based fertilizers.

I'll also tackle 3, regarding historic low prices. Prices were low for a reason. Prices surged for a reason. The reasons are the same. Governments, in America, Europe as well as developing countries, have erected trade barriers and put in place large subsidies that distort global markets and protect their farmers. This has meant that farmers who should've gone on to other things have stuck around pumping out too much food, depressing prices. Then we, the US, comes along and suddenly over the space of a few years divert about 1/3 of our domestic maize crop to ethanol, and put in place mandates for even more ethanol. Economists warned at the very start of the ethanol craze it'd drive up prices, asking how ethical that would be.. but when the farm lobby and liberals get together, the resulting force is unstoppable.

Prices did need to be a bit higher, but before prices came back down it was way too high.

quote: 4. Most ethanol is produced in Brazil. I doubt growing cheap food in South America will help the Africans much.

We have an import tariff on Brazilian ethanol, and thus almost none is imported.

quote: 5. ...but the cheaper oil prices as a result of more people using bio-fuels will help everyone!

Not if, as has been the case up till now, biofuels wreak havoc in other markets just to have a tiny impact on oil prices. Oil is coming down because of a global recession, not ethanol. Also, you appear concerned about Africa and poor countries, but that happens to be where a lot of oil is. Lower oil prices mean less revenue their governments have to invest in human capital and infrastructure. Double edged sword!

quote: just how large a population can our planet sustain?"

As long as we aren't burning food for fuel, Brazil alone has vast tracts of land that could be brought under cultivation, and if everybody had the same productivity as American farmers.. we're no where near the limit we could sustain over time. The above question only rears its head with the same idiots that thought in the 70s that by 2000 the world would have already collapsed in to mass famine.

Famine in Africa has nothing to do with the amount of food being produced globally, just as poverty in the streets of Calcutta has nothing to do with the amount of money circulating globally.

Besides, no idea what "green" (meaning ecological, I assume) has to do with famine. You're talking about producing food in one part of the world vs. the lack of food in a completely different place. How it that a "green" issue? It seems you're just picking nonsensical arguments to support your prejudiced and flawed understanding of what ecology is.

Wind turbines are viable in some areas, but very few. Biodiesel as it exists in the US is a scam. Solar panels, on the other hand, have improved massively over the past few years, and are set to improve even more over the next decade.

For the short-term, lots of nuclear plus some solar is definitely the way to go, and most real ecologists (the ones with a science degree, not the rich drop-outs who think it's cool to be in Greenpeace) agree.

In the long term, solar will probably replace everything else (virtually all the energy on Earth comes from there anyway; we'll just be cutting out the middle man).

But if you think we don't have more nuclear because of the "tree-huggers", you're very naif. Sorry to shatter your worldview, but the "tree-hugger lobby" doesn't have nearly as much power as the people who would lose millions if nuclear was adopted in large scale: big oil.

If we didn't waste oil to generate electricity, we'd be (almost) self-sufficient for transportation (which is the area where the energy density of fossil fuels is really essential). But when you have a president that walks hand in hand with the biggest oil "pusher" in the world, what do you expect?

The problem is that people like Jason push green technology regardless of it’s practicality. If it’s green, but twice the cost of what it replaces, the cost is ignored and it’s declared a great improvement.

Always root for the underdog. It's the American way. The problem is that both sides are the underdog in this one, in different ways. Most scientists believe in GW, but nothing is being done - so your either the underdog by 'disproving' GW, or by fighting to implement change because of it. But either way, they are both agendas. One agenda is trying to push through change, the other agenda is trying to block that change. Your statement that bucking scientifically accepted theories (in order to prevent a policy shift with respect to 'green tech') isn't an agenda is simply misguided rhetoric. It may be an agenda you support, but it's an agenda.

And it's not true that for every bit of evidence that supports GW there's evidence against it. The evidence is impartial, really. The most-accepted interpretations of that evidence seem to support GW. There is a difference between healthy skepticism and bias. A healthy skeptic examines the evidence critically. A biased judge cherry-picks the evidence they want to hear. For instance, the final results for this year's polar ice melt are available, but masher still hasn't put out a new article reporting those numbers. While still a better year than last, the final numbers were significantly below those reported in the article he linked to in this article - the numbers he declared were those for the end of the melting season. The total difference was over 30% less than he reported. (See how statistics can be cleverly manipulated? 30% is a big percentage. It's the difference between the 13% greater coverage he reported in August and the 9% greater coverage that was the final number for September. So his numbers were 4% too high, a 30% difference.)

Of course, what we really need is somebody acting impartially - you know, like, um, scientists, who would look at the evidence, and balance the conflicting interpretations to come to some conclusion about the effect of human activity on global climate. Unfortunately, whenever we try to structure a group like that, one side of the debate engages in ad hominem attacks against the members of that group. Additionally, once the report is issued (by say, some kind of theoretical intergovernmental panel on climate change. Hmm. That's a good name. They should call themselves that.) the decision of what are acceptable sacrifices that would result in real tangible improvements is left open to further debate.

There is an especially tricky concern in balancing liberty and safety. The (generally) accepted rule has been that as long as you don't hurt others, you're within your rights of freedom. But when the causality of one's actions are once or twice removed, it is difficult to see where the line should be drawn. My coffee or clothing choices may hurt others indirectly, but am I really responsible for the indirect consequences of my actions? The issue is even more clouded when we are talking about the combined choices of a billion, nay, 6 billion people. What I'm saying is that, even accepting anthropogenic global warming, the path forward is not clear.

Your argument that the length of recorded history is too small to make judgments about climate trends clashes with your acceptance of this single data point (a much smaller time period) as evidence of global cooling. I'll just throw that out there, without supporting that we have enough evidence to make decisions about global warming, because I leave that decision to scientists. (Ad verecundiam, I know. But c'mon, it's the basis of representational democracy. Put competent people in a position of trust. It's seems to be the best we mere mortals can do.)

And I'll finish by saying that Asher is not 'just saying for every bit of evidence that says there's global warming, there's evidence to say there's global cooling' in this article. Unless you count anecdotal evidence. In this article, and the linked article he used as a source for it, there are no real figures. It's "the worst summer" one guy has seen "in 20 years". In one location in Alaska, there was still snow on top of the ice field - in July. What about now? In another location (the landslide he mentions) there is no snow now, but there was snow longer than usual (obviously not a glacier, since it's usually snow-free part of the year). Let's see some numbers. How much bigger are the Alaskan glaciers this year than last? What is the normal annual change in glacier coverage? These questions would help us understand exactly what is going on better than isolated data points (points are meaningless in isolation when you're trying to determine a trend).

Answer those questions, and that would be a data point that was lower than the upward trend in temperatures (along with the sea ice data point). But even so, it takes more than one winter-summer combo to be evidence of global cooling. Like the original article says, talk to me when we've had ten summers like this (hey, I'll take four or five), and we'll start talking about evidence for global cooling.

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